Other than touch events, is there any appreciable difference between testing a responsive design by resizing a desktop browser and testing it on a mobile device? There are a plethora of mobile devices that could be potentially tested and I'm trying to weigh cost vs. benefit. How do others go about testing for mobile?

Edit: To be clear, I'm talking about a mobile website or web app, not a native mobile app. Also, is there a list or a website has mobile browser differences? The best I could find Quirksmode, which actually has quite a lot of good info on it, though some of it is older:

I know of at least one issue on iOS, the "iOS orientation change zoom bug" that doesn't show up on non iOS devices. There may be other issues unique to other platforms like Android. In any case you really can't be sure without testing on a range of device families or use something like browserstack.com. At this point I'm just keeping my layouts fairly simple and rugged and hoping.
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obeliaJan 29 '13 at 0:39

I found the bug too. It happen because some characteristics of a browser in PC has are not exist in a mobile browser. For example, users cannot hover links in browsers in mobile devices.
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LookchinJan 29 '13 at 17:20

The browser-resizing trick works to solve 90% of problems, as it's more than most sites do even now. If I were only doing stuff for myself I might stop there...
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Rachel KeslenskyJan 29 '13 at 21:13

As what I've experienced, I test the site by resizing the browser, but I need to be sure that's why I also use other ways to test the site, I'm using mattkersley.com/responsive and also mobiletest.me
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user57121Nov 7 '14 at 8:04

4 Answers
4

From my experience, I will test by resizing a desktop browsers to screen out some bugs first, and then test on my mobile devices, such as an iPad and iPhone, because some bugs happen only in mobile devices as mentioned above. I focus on popular devise first. It is impossible to test on all devises, because there are a lot of versions and resolution of devices. Thus, I did an open beta to test with limited number of users to get some defects from users' devises. Many native applications were tested by these steps below, so I used these techniques to test mobile websites. The popular tool to tes beta test for mobile applications is https://testflightapp.com/ and http://try.crashlytics.com/.

My suggestion steps

Test by resizing desktop browsers

Test in browsers in popular devises which you have

Test by an open beta with limited numbers of users' to get users'
feedback and bugs reports (You should inform users that they help
you to test your products and may encounter some bugs)

Deploy and get some users' feedbacks

It is impossible to test all devices, because of time and money constraints.

However, if it's an experience your want to test there's nothing better than testing on a device as hardware capabilities can sometimes make or break a particular design especially in the Android market

Why is this better than just resizing the browser?
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JonW♦Jan 29 '13 at 21:22

Resizing and doing what? Asking people to use the mouse to navigate the thing on a narrow desktop website? Am I missing something?
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Alex DebkaliukJan 29 '13 at 21:26

As the question states: "other than touch events, is there any appreciable difference between testing a responsive design by resizing a desktop browser and testing it on a mobile device?"
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JonW♦Jan 29 '13 at 21:28